Mailman 3 SaaS

How to create a user support list?

It might be more convenient to receive support requests from users to a mailing list rather than to a dedicated email address. The problem with this approach is that if the list is open to the public, it will be spammed heavily.

In this article, we go step by step through support list creation and configuration to make it the most useful and minimize operational burden.

⚠️ This isn’t relevant to stock Mailman code because it relies on custom Mailman3.com features.

1. Create two mailing lists: support@domain.tld with private archives and customers@domain.tld with archiving disabled.

The first mailing list is our support address: in the “Message Acceptance” menu, set the “Default action” parameter for its members to “Default processing” and for its non-members to “Hold for moderation”. Members of this list are your support engineers or customer success specialists.

The second mailing list is a source of customers’ registered emails. We are not going to accept any emails to that list, so set both members and non-members “Message Acceptance” to “Discard”.

2. Set the “Accept these non-members” parameter of the support@domain.tld list to “@customers@domain.tld”.

With this parameter, all members of the customers@domain.tld list will be allowed to post to the support@domain.tld list without moderation.

3. Configure the support@domain.tld list to preserve DKIM signatures.

In the “Alter Messages” menu, set “Don’t break DKIM” to “Yes” and ensure you don’t do “Filter content” and “Convert html to plaintext”. Set an empty “Subject prefix” and an empty footer template (“list:member:regular:footer”). Check you don’t do DMARC mitigations for the list.

4. Set a meaningful response to support requests.

Use the “list:user:notice:hold” template to set a meaningful response to support requests, e.g. Your mail to '$listname' with the subject "$subject" has been received and added to the support backlog. You will be contacted by a support engineer soon.

5. Maintain customers@domain.tld members via Postorius, Newsletter, or Mailman Core API.

Use Postorius or Mailman Newsletter to manually add members to the customers@domain.tld list. (Mailman Newsletter handles large lists with more grace.)

To automate adding new customers to the list, you can use a POST request to the Mailman Core API:

curl -i -X POST 'https://api.lists.mailman3.com/3.1/members' \
  -u 'MAILMAN_API_USER:MAILMAN_API_PASSWORD' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "list_id": "customers.mailman3.com",
    "subscriber": "user@example.com",
    "pre_verified": true,
    "pre_confirmed": true,
    "pre_approved": true,
    "send_welcome_message": false
  }'

I suggest explicitly setting “Send welcome/goodbye message” to “No” for the customers@domain.tld list to avoid disturbing customers with unnecessary ham.

6. Use AI Moderator to filter spam coming to the support@domain.tld list.

Hire our AI Moderator companion app to automatically filter out spam messages sent to the support list based on their spam scores. Enable daily email reports to be notified about possible false positives. You can use auto-approval to automatically allow messages with a low spam score.